Bernards Voices

From Dr. Leslie Becker-Phelps, Psychology Today Making Change blog, The First Step to Meeting Your Personal Goal:

Strategies for dealing with emotions: 1. suppress/deflect, 2. minimize/deny, or:

3. Another way people try to manage their distress is by working to solve their problems intellectually. This is great when they are faced with a problem they can solve. But it becomes a problem in itself when people repetitively review a problem that has no real or clear answer.

Or worse, in my experience, you come up with a clear answer which fails. You’re seduced by your own analysis.

Leslie’s recommendation:

There is evidence that you can strengthen your ability to manage affect, much like you can strengthen a muscle. To do this, practice sitting with our emotions. Spend time allowing emotions to rise within you and then subside, which they will naturally do. With practice, you can decide when to temporarily suppress emotions or sublimate them (channeling your feelings into a healthy activity). And, the better you become at managing your feelings, the better you will also be at following through with good plans for self-improvement.

My doctor, and some close friends, recommend mindfulness meditation. Be still, my beating heart. I achieve that at the yoga studio, it is harder, in a disciplined way, to bring it into my home. Maintain a daily practice. It is even harder with the thermostat set for 61–thankfully our winter has been mild so far.

In her follow-on post, in preparation for Thanksgiving, Leslie talks about gratitude the same way.

You might find it helpful to think of the feeling of gratitude as a muscle that gets stronger with use. To this end, below are two exercises that have been scientifically found to increase gratitude.

Gratitude journal: Keep a journal each night (for at least 2 months), listing at least 3 things that you were grateful for that day.

Gratitude letter and visit: Think of someone who has been a positive influence on you at anytime in your life, but who you have not thanked. Reminisce about how the person has made your life better, and then craft a letter to say thank you, being specific about what they did and how it affected you. Then set up a time to meet with the person without telling them why. When you sit down with them, read them the letter – slowly and with emotion. Give them a chance to react and respond. And, finally, take the opportunity to continue to reminisce together about what makes them so special to you.

Heavy lifting for me. I don’t know about you.

Reading self-help advice like this often churns my stomach–that emotion stuff–but I can’t argue that daily practices like meditation or focusing on what you are grateful for, would, if I could follow them, improve my outlook, strengthen relationships. If that’s what I wanted to happen. Do I want that?

And then Leslie’s next post, this one preparing for the holidays:

The best gift you can ever give those who love you is a healthy you.

Psychologists describe a phenomenon called fundamental attribution error, which explains her [math teacher's] inclination to initially judge this boy negatively based on his behaviors. Stated simply, when observing the behavior of others, most people tend to rely too much on personality-based explanations and rely too little on situational explanations.

via Dr. Leslie Becker-Phelps: Be Careful of How You Judge Others and Yourself « The Art of Relationships.

When I met my therapist last week, we were talking about behavior. I talked about something stupid I was doing, and something stupid I perceived someone else was doing. He said all behavior was a solution to something. The solution may be a good one or “mal-adaptive”–his better word than my “stupid.”

He also said no one was immune to poor behavior.

And he suggested that the appropriate stance was to be curious about the solution chosen, what was the source problem?

As [the teacher] talked with him, she learned that he also had two friends who recently died. After this conversation, he listened well in class and “aced” the tests. She ended her letter with the realization, “And I thought he was the one not paying attention.”

This very human failing [fundamental attribution error] can cause people to make snap judgments that are inaccurate, or at least don’t capture the whole picture.

This dynamic is complicated by the fact that people are much more inclined to blame their own problems on the situation than on themselves.

Leslie goes on the acknowledge that the opposite is true (blame self vs. situation) for many other people. I wonder if it is situational or more consistently personality driven: i.e. in some contexts (the office, the yoga studio, the tennis court … ) is someone is more apt to blame the situation then self?

It’s important to understand that the purpose of meditation is to see your consciousness (the flow of your thoughts and feelings). Most people are not aware of just how busy their minds are until they really pay attention. So, if you approach meditation as a practice of seeing your consciousness, then you can undoubtedly meditate – because all you need to do is be aware.

via Open Your Mind And Say Ahhh | Psychology Today. – Dr. Leslie Becker-Phelps

From May 10th, The New York Times, Alastair Gee reports that “Hazy Recall as a Signal Foretelling Depression”

–in studies under way at Oxford and elsewhere, scientists are looking … to gain new insights into the diagnosis and treatment of depression. They are focusing not on what people remember, but how.

The phenomenon is called overgeneral memory, a tendency to recall past events in a broad, vague manner. “It’s an unsung vulnerability factor for unhelpful reactions when things go wrong in life,” said Mark Williams, the clinical psychologist who has been leading the Oxford studies.

Some forgetting is essential for healthy functioning — “If you’re trying to remember where you parked the car at the supermarket, it would be disastrous if all other times you parked the car at the supermarket came to mind,” said Martin Conway, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Leeds in England. But, a chronic tendency to obliterate details has been linked to longer and more intense episodes of depression.

This is one of my posts, which is just a string of excerpts from the article, but the article is clear, really speaks for itself.

And an unusual paper suggests that overgeneral memory is a risk factor for post-traumatic stress disorder. Scientists at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, assessed 46 firefighters during their initial training and again four years later, when all had experienced traumatic events like seeing comrades injured or killed. Those who could not recall the past in specific detail during the first assessment were much likelier to have developed the disorder by the later one.

Is overgeneral memory the chicken or the egg? “perhaps overgeneral memory exists in the first place … to block particular traumatic or painful memories.”

Without detailed memories to draw upon, dispelling a black mood can seem impossible. Patients may remember once having felt happy, but cannot recall specific things that contributed to their happiness, like visiting friends or a favorite restaurant.

Some experts think such insights could also be helpful in treating depression. For example, Spanish researchers have reported that aging patients showed fewer symptoms of depression and hopelessness after they practiced techniques for retrieving detailed memories.

Dr. Williams has found that specificity can be increased with training in mindfulness, a form of meditation increasingly popular in combating some types of depression. Subjects are taught to focus on moment-to-moment experiences and to accept their negative thoughts rather than trying to avoid them.